The Daffodils (Dance, Dance Revolution)

Symbol Analysis In "I wandered lonely as a Cloud," the daffodils are like little yellow people who keep the speaker company when he is feeling lonely. The happiness of the daffodils can always cheer him up, and he can tell that they are happy because they dance. Some variation of the word "dance" occurs in each of the four stanzas. Also, the speaker is taken aback by how many daffodils there are. We often think of daffodils as a flower that people plant in their gardens in the springtime, so it would be surprising to come upon thousands of them by an isolated lake.

Lines 3-4: The daffodils are personified as a crowd of people. This personification will continue throughout the poem. Lines 6: Daffodils cannot actually "dance," so Wordsworth is ascribing to them an action that is associated with people. Line 9: The speaker says that the line of daffodils is "never-ending," but we know this cant be strictly true: all good things come to an end. This is an example of hyperbole, or exaggeration. Lines 12: The personification of the daffodils becomes more specific. The "heads" of the daffodils are the part of the flower with the petals. It is larger and heavier than the stem, and so it bobs in a breeze. (When you think about it, its kind of amazing how flowers support themselves at all.) Lines 13-14: The waves also get in on some of the dancing (andpersonification) action, but the daffodils are not to be out-done they are happier than the waves. Lines 21-24: Wordsworth imagines the daffodils in his spiritual vision, for which he uses the metaphor of an "inward eye." His heart dances like a person, too.

Clouds, Sky, and Heavens

Symbol Analysis "I wandered lonely as a Cloud" has the remote, otherworldly atmosphere that is suggested by the title. The speaker feels like a cloud, distant and separated from the world below. But this distance becomes a good thing when he comes upon the daffodils, which are like little stars. Its as if the problem at the beginning is that he hasnt ascended high enough.

Lines 1-2: The beginning of the poem makes a simile between the speakers wandering and the "lonely" distant movements of a single cloud. Clouds cant be lonely, so we have another example of personification. Lines 7-8: The second stanza begins with a simile comparing the shape and number of the daffodils to the band of stars that we call the Milky Way galaxy.

Angels and Spirits

Symbol Analysis You have to read into the poem a bit, but we think that Wordsworth is definitely trying to associate the flowers with angelic or heavenly beings. Maybe he was thinking of Dantes Paradiso from The Divine Comedy, in which all the angels and blessed souls of heaven form a big flower. However, Wordsworth is a more naturalistic (i.e., strictly realistic) poet than Dante, and so the imagery of angels is extremely subtle.

Line 4: You may have heard the phrase, "heavenly host" in reference to angels or spirits. We think Wordsworth adds the word "host" in order to suggest this connection. Also, the color of the flowers is golden like a halo. Line 10: Stars are associated with angels, too, so the similecomparing the flowers to "twinkling" stars reinforces the connection. Line 12: The word "sprightly" is derived from the word "sprite," meaning a local spirit, almost like a fairy.

The force of simile: the poem serves as an introduction to some simple (and other, not-so-simple) modes of poetic figuration (or troping). It begins with a simile (I was like a cloud) and moves into other kinds of comparisons. He (Wordsworth) is solitary, but he is also part of a group. In another simile, he makes the daffodils themselves solitary, or removed. he role of personification: Wordsworth chooses to humanize (or personify) his daffodils, and we may wonder why. There is a continual exchange between him and his flowers, as he surveys his position by comparison with theirs.Grammar and word choice: it is important to examine a poets diction and to ask why he chooses certain words instead of other, almost equivalent ones. What do we make of host, golden, wealth, show, and the lines A poet could not but be gay/In such a jocund company? Importance of repetition and variation: One thing we notice is that many of the poems opening details are repeated, though with variation, in subsequent stanzas, and we must determine the force of such repetition. Above all, we notice two special twists in stanza 4: a repetition of all of the previous details and a shift in tense from the past to the generalized present. Wordsworth also includesand in some cases repeatsreferences to the four classical elements: air, earth, fire, water. The words dance or dancing appear in all four stanzas. Overall unity: the poem not only recounts, but also dramatizes, the workings of the human mind (one of Wordsworths great themes) and makes an important statement about the independent, unwilled, and uncontrollable faculty of memory. It does so, at its climax, with a telling and delightful use of alliteration and a particular emphasis on a preposition (a part of speech that Wordsworth used to great advantage), in this case with, that links him to the flowers.